My DSX just arrived, and I'm really mixed about its performance and wondered if you had any advice. I thought it was a little risky because my speakers are merely good, not phenomenal. (I have a Z-5300 5.1 system.) I took the gamble and bought the card, and the sound is great—but I can only enjoy it from two speakers.

I've played around with the control panel, and I've tried the "Unified" (read: modded) drivers, but both give me a confusing, ugly, insane interface full of options that only muddy up the sound. I bought the card for the hardware, but the software makes it difficult or impossible to do what I could do with built-in motherboard audio.

I'd like to listen to stereo audio sources (movies, music, YouTube videos, whatever) and hear it on all five monitors. I'd also like to jump into Skyrim and hear enemies approaching from behind. With my integrated motherboard audio, this was easy, but those options don't show up in the Windows properties for the DSX, and the DSX control panel itself is horrible. It seems they want me to reconfigure my audio settings every time I change my audio source. (Let's not even get into how that precludes me playing music and Skyrim simultaneously.)

Am I missing something about the drivers? Is there any way to let a generic driver take over and just enjoy the higher-quality DACs? I don't care about headphone performance, and I don't care about SPDIF encoding or any such thing. The sound quality is a nice jump up from my integrated audio, but I'm afraid I might have to return the card because it "breaks my workflow" as it were.

Return it and buy the one with proper drivers and controls Soundblaster Recon3D, or if you want better SNR numbers - Soundblaster Z (which is the same **** only with better DACs, gold-plated connectors and fancy metal shield). I have one, been using it for few months, 0 issues with hardware/software. I mostly use it for 2.1 sound, though...

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Yea, but from what I've read from other users, there was no major issues using their 5.1 systems with these new Creative cards... Anyway, I suggest buying one from a place with good return policy and trying it out yourself. If it'll work with your particular setup - good, if not - return it.

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I agree with JohnC that it may be wise to ditch the card and try for Creative's new lineup. The issues you are having are troubling though. When you say you cannot switch audio sources, you mean you simply cannot go from a media player to a game without it prompting for a reconfig? I would wipe all audio drivers, install mobo drivers, then re install how directions from Asus say to. Also try and wipe drivers and go directly to installing DSX drivers, since it should not be this driver difficult. Which version of Windows are you using?

Majiir Paktu wrote:

Hi folks,

Am I missing something about the drivers? Is there any way to let a generic driver take over and just enjoy the higher-quality DACs? I don't care about headphone performance, and I don't care about SPDIF encoding or any such thing. The sound quality is a nice jump up from my integrated audio, but I'm afraid I might have to return the card because it "breaks my workflow" as it were.

Thanks for any tips!Majiir

The op-amp will only work for the green/line out channel on the card. All other channels will not be standard.

Do you mean with stereo upmix enabled in the driver it's on for everything? So you have to go back to the driver and turn it off in order to play Skyrim in 5.1 mode? If that's the case, you might have a better solution in doing the upmixing using your software filters, instead of using the driver.

Install an all-in-one codec pack and make sure audio for all codecs go through a filter like ffdshow audio. From there you have a mixer section where you can hard-set the output config to 5.1, 7.1 or whatever your choice is, with the option to expand stereo to center and/or surround. For youtube, get one of the plugins that replaces flash with windows media or VLC so you can run it through the ffdshow audio filter as well.

Another advantage to this is aside from stereo upmixing you can use any of the other filters available in ffdshow. Normalize can be an ear saver when watching stuff from online like youtube and twitch.tv.

Personally, I havent tried using upmixing, because I found it decently bad compared to my mains which are B&W speakers, so I just went the route with using surround in games and 2 channel from stereo sources. Never have to change everything unless I want to use the headphones, but I have a Xense which has a better builtin support for headphones.

But what settings did you use, and did you enable the virtual speaker shifter or one of the DSP modes. I just leave everything at stock. No DSP modes, no emulation or anything. Set channels to the appropriate amount, that is 5.1 (or 6 perhaps its called in the drivers). Then I set my output to whatever I require, I actually run surround over spdif to my amp system. Then you have to remember to setup the windows panel for 5.1 too. Dont know if you can add upmixing on <5.1 on top of that and that it would keep the settings for multichannel, but I cant see any reason that it would remix the 5.1 if the source is 5.1 even with upmixing.

The Asus Xonar drivers are horrid. I discovered, when configuring my HTPC, that the optical SPDIF output would not actually work when correctly enabled in Windows 8 and shown as actively playing. I had to dig through the Asus control applet and checkmark a particular option, and then everything worked.

You may be having a similar issue here -- make sure the options for 5.1 are set up correctly in both the Asus control applet (select 6-channel output) AND the Windows sound control interface (select 5.1 speakers).